Leslie Horn

Artist Pedro Reyes takes confiscated weapons and turns them into fully mechanized instruments in an ongoing project called Destroy. Here's a look at how.

We saw the remains of 6,700 guns turned into an entire orchestra that played John Lennon's "Imagine" last winter. Now Reyes is back again with eight new instruments, and a look at how he turns glocks and shotguns into woodwinds and xylophones and so much more.

Confiscated weapons are always destroyed, but that doesn't mean the wreckage can't be…
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Reyes and his team takes all kinds of weapons seized from drug cartels in Mexico and crafts killing machines into all kinds of music making machines. They're first dismantled, so they can't actually be weapons again, then they're mechanized using some technology developed by a Mexico City media workshop called Cocolab. The lab has created a series of mechanisms that allow musicians to use software to make music. It's complicated and incredible, and there's something to be said for turning a killing machines into a something positive. [Creators Project via Colossal]